Cleaning the cat (and other things that aren’t euphamisms)

Someone said to me today that they wondered if they had any emotions left because they hadn’t ‘felt’ in about 2 years. This is amazingly common. Ask yourself, when was the last time you remember feeling love? Happiness? Peace? Anger even?

Some people will have felt all those things today! Maybe even in the last 10 minutes! That’s amazingly common too!

To the people that don’t ‘feel’, I almost always ask the same question; ‘when did you first feel out of control of your emotions?’

Have you ever tried to give a cat a bath? It’s a bloody nightmare let me tell you! In my experience it is one of the most violent and futile tasks you can ever take part in. The more you hold, the more it struggles. The more you push, the more it wriggles and they are strong when they are giving it them all. The minute you lose concentration, you’re bleeding. It is an act of sheer brute strength to hold on to even a tiny sliver of control! It’s nuts. I’m glad I have a dog these days!

Why talk about bathing cats? Because bathing a cat is just like controlling your mind! What most people do is they hold tighter and tighter giving less and less wriggle room to try and stop their mind from ‘biting’ them. But there is the problem. When you hold your mind tightly to avoid it causing you pain, you also stop any chance of it giving you pleasure. The more you control it, the less it ‘moves’, the less it ‘moves’, the less you feel.

So what do I ask people to do next? I ask them to accept and let go of control. Its just like letting go of the cat, the first thing you’ll get is scratched! But just wait, once you let it run off the fear and the anger everything chills out. Before you know it, it’s clean, purring and back to its old self.